Your Obedient Serpent

PSA: Only You Can Prevent SRMD!

Science Related Memetic Disorder:Science Related Memetic Disorder (SRMD) is a memetic disease which susceptible persons can both catch and transmit. SRMD appears to be a naturally-occurring memetic disorder which spreads via fringe science books and half-baked online rantings. A susceptible person - usually an engineer or scientist whose theories have been snubbed by his professional peers - who reads one of these rants can catch SRMD. Once a person has been infected with the SRMD meme complex, he or she will begin to constuct a scientific theory and will go to any length to prove it and to show everyone who disregarded his work that his theory is correct. Persons infected with SRMD, who are colloquially called "mad scientists," will often engage in illegal or hazardous actions to further their goals.

Signs that your loved one has an SRMD infection are: manic laughter, a desire to build a secret lab, hoarding of radioactive materials, sleep deprivation, building armies of oozing zombies in the bathroom, and dry mouth.

Show me what? That you're just another mad engineer and not really a mad scientist? Are you going to build a penguin-shaped mirror-surfaced zeppelin, with minijet engines and a keel-mounted coilgun control group? No? I thought not. Engineer!

I think it's due to the big overlap of research science with engineering and humanities, especially in earlier generations. Someone like Einstein or Feynman isn't especially mad, since their hobbies don't really go nuts interacting with their professional interests, but an earlier scientist-architect-engineer-renaissance man, like Newton or Jefferson, has a greater chance of connecting up disciplines in weird ways. Which means, contrary to how trendy steampunk is, the golden age of mad science was actually the 1700s.